t that is!" And as at
the word our savages, who had been talking together, now at the next
resting place put forward their boldest, who with great reverence asked
if there were women in heaven.

Through most of this day we struggled with a difficult if fantastically
beautiful country. Where rock outcropped and in the sands of bright
rapid streams we looked for signs of that gold, so stressed as though
it were the only salvation! But the rocks were silent, and though in
the bed of a shrunken streamlet we found some glistening particles and
scraping them carefully together got a small spoonful to wrap in cloth
and bestow in our pouch of treasures, still were we not sure that it was
wholly gold. It might be. We worked for an hour for just this pinch.

Since yesterday morning our path had been perfectly solitary. Then
suddenly, when we were, we thought, six leagues at least from the ships,
the way turning and entering a small green dell, we came upon three
Indians seated resting, their backs to palm trees. We halted, they
raised their eyes. They stared, they rose in amazement at the sight of
those gods, Roderigo Jerez, Luis Torres and Juan Lepe. They stood like
statues with great eyes and parted lips. For us, coming silently upon
them, we had too our moment of astonishment.

They were three copper men, naked, fairly tall and well to look at. But
each had between his lips what seemed a brown stick, burning at the far
end, dropping a light ash and sending up a thin cloud of odorous smoke.
These burning sticks they dropped as they rose. They had seemed so
silent, so contented, so happy, sitting there with backs to trees,
a firebrand in each mouth, I felt a love for them! Luis thought the
lighted sticks some rite of their religion, but after a while when we
came to examine them, we found them not true stick, but some large,
thickish brown leaf tightly twisted and pressed together and having a
pungent, not unpleasing odor. We crumbled one in our hands and tasted
it. The taste was also pungent, strange, but one might grow to like it.
They called the stick tobacco, and said they always used it thus with
fire, drinking in the smoke and puffing it out again as they showed us
through the nostrils. We thought it a great curiosity, and so it was!

But to them we were unearthly beings. The men from the sea told of
us, then as it were introduced Diego Colon, who spoke proudly with
appropriate gesture, loving always his part of herald